English Harbour group apologises and will compensate players

The English Harbour row took a positive turn early this week when the respected Wizard of Odds, Mike Shackleford published his initial findings, and the online casino group admitted it had been at fault and offered return of monies plus a 20 percent bonus for the hassle.

Shackleford said that he has reviewed the detailed playing logs in conjunction with Odds On the software provider, which in assembling the data had also discovered certain anomalies in the double up records.

"I was able to confirm that the double-up on video poker did indeed pay out less than it should have between April 13 and May 2," wrote Shackleford. "According to English Harbor the problem was caused by a buggy software update on April 13, which was automatically corrected by a subsequent update on May 2."

The Wizard routinely reviews the EH logs for fairness on a monthly basis, he reveals. "Though players noticed the problem in April, I would not normally see the April data until mid May. This underscores the important point that my auditing service can not guarantee that players will get a mathematically fair game at every given instant. I can only attest to the fairness and return percentages in the past," he commented.

Shackleford also confirmed that although the problem seemed to have been confined to the period April 13 to May 2, he will be scrutinising earlier logs to make sure, and will be monitoring future play closely.

In apologising to the player community, English Harbour management said that the anomalies were caused by a bug in the software staging release on late on April 13 and went unnoticed. "On May 2 we had a maintenance release that during the course of our investigation seemed to have corrected the problem," the companys communication says.

"When we were alerted to the claim, we ran through several trials and also simulations. We checked randomness of the distribution of cards in the doubling game over different time periods and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary."

Based on this, the management made an "interim release" to reassure players on the fora but continued the investigation, bringing in the independent services of Shackleford, who had already been alerted to the problem.

However, in complying with Shackleford's request for player logs the staff "....noticed an issue that seemed to have spanned the later two weeks of April. We mentioned this to Michael as we continued to work with him. Through Michael's investigation, he concurred with our observations and was able help quantify the variance in the odds."

The English Harbour announcement ends with an assurance that "...we will be refunding affected players on the net loss on the doubling game plus an additional 20 percent of their net loss. Players will be receiving an email as well as a message within the casino itself shortly."

The initial reaction of players on the fora was not positive, with many players asking for more detail on the technical cause and nature of the fault, and voicing suspicion at EH's initial denial that anything was untoward.